“Chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost maniacal impulse to seek their pleasures amongst smoke and vapour, soot and flames, poisons and poverty, yet amongst all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that I would rather die than change places with the King of Persia.”

As I have said many times before, I totally recommend ChemFeeds for getting a quick and comprehensible overview of the most recent Chemistry literature. I can’t even begin to imagine how much work is needed behind the scenes to make the whole thing work. Two thumbs up!

I remember at one point having a (review?) paper called “Pyridine!” in my collection. Love that title. I can’t remember who wrote it, what year it was from or what it contained. Now I can’t find it again, because SciFinder and Google Scholar seem to ignore the exclamation mark in text based searches. If you […]

I would be most surprised if anyone of you had heard of the Willgerodt-Kindler reaction before. It stinks, literally and figuratively. Don’t get me wrong, the reaction works really well, but that is also its actual problem. The desired products are extremely undesired, if you know what I am saying. I have […]

— Judging from this 1H-NMR, it looks like your product was epimerized during work-up. — No. No. That’s not true. The LCMS is flawless. That’s impossible! — Search your feelings, this coupling constant, you know it is a cis configuration. — No! Noooooooooooo!

In 1972 Bruce Lee defeated Chuck Norris (here) and team Far East has been winning ever since. China is on a monumental roll. If we fast-forward to present day and for example summarize the table of contents for one recent issue of Synlett, […]